Sarah Rayner portrait. Photo: Charmaine Lyons
Sarah Rayner lives and works in Wootha, Gubbi Gubbi country, Sunshine Coast Hinterland, Queensland. As an artist she predominately works sculpturally creating collections of porcelain objects, underpinned by an interest in plant reproduction and the aesthetics of museology.
Sarah graduated with an honour’s degree from the University of Southern Queensland in 1997 majoring in textiles. She exhibited, tutored and lectured within this field of practice for over 20years. Over the last six years, Sarah has used porcelain as a medium from which to translate observations of her local environment. Porcelain has fascinating historic and cultural associations to alchemy and desirability which Sarah draws on within her practice making correlations between the precious nature of the material and her subject matter.
Living in bushland and surrounded by flora, Sarah has a close affinity with Australian native plants. She is both informed and inspired by plant’s sheer ingenuity and tenacity, their cyclic metamorphosis and the clever methods they have evolved to attract pollinators and protect their precious seeds. Her particular interest lies in the reproductive organs of plants and the by-products of plant reproduction … fruits and seedpods. Sarah studies and dissects these incredible structures examining junctions and joins, form, texture, cracks and crevices and the way layers peel back to reveal sensuous interiors. Distilling the acts of walking, observing, collecting, scrutinizing and making she creates sculptural forms which are simultaneously familiar yet strange.
The fragility and delicate balance of the natural world in the face of human impact are overriding and recurring themes within Sarah’s practice.
Sarah has exhibited locally, nationally and internationally and has had public artworks commissioned by the Brisbane City Council in Melbourne Street, West End and in the Mater Private Hospital, Springfield Queensland. Her work is held in the Toowoomba Regional Art gallery collection, the Sunshine Coast regional Gallery and represented in many private collections locally and overseas. Sarah is represented by Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Rushcutters Bay, Sydney. Her upcoming solo exhibition distance of a whisper will open February 25 2023.